Hey everyone, Zig here! Happy Wednesday once again.
So last week I released the first episode of my photography podcast, “The Shutter Button Podcast” and I have to say that I had a lot of fun making it, as well as a fair amount of stress. However, I think now that I’ve gotten through the first episode, I’ve learned a few things about the recording process that should make it easier when I do episode 2 for next week! I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am, I’m going to be going over the topic of building a portfolio; things like which services to use and what kind of projects you can do to help fill your portfolio with variety. So until then, please stay tuned!
Today, however, I’d like to talk about an equipment purchase I made the other day to build a small home studio. My goal was to put together a small kit of equipment I could use for several types of projects; product photography, macro photography, experimental art photography, and a few other ideas that I haven’t fully thought about yet. I decided that for this kind of setup I would need a few things;
A light source, stand, and umbrella diffuser. (For now, just one light will do, but at some point, having two light sources will be a great way of expanding the potential of my at-home projects.)
A light tent for product photography.
A table to work on. (Anything will work, as long as it’s sturdy!)
A glass or acrylic watertight box/fish tank. (I’m planning to use this to experiment with taking macro photos of underwater subjects!)
Overall, I don’t think this is a very demanding list, but depending on the equipment, it could get very expensive very quickly. I did quite a bit of shopping around and exploring on different retailers and settled on getting everything from a few different places. For the table, I purchased a very inexpensive folding table off of amazon and for the fish tank, I thankfully had an unused one from a previous freshwater set up in my house. I picked out all of the remaining items on my shopping list from B&H Photo Video. I ended up picking out the following items to complete my setup;
With this equipment, I think I’ve got the perfect setup to start experimenting and learning how to work with certain still life subjects and items for product photography. I’m also very excited to have a singular spot that I can use whenever I’m feeling creative and want to shoot. Also, because this equipment is so portable, I’ll be able to move it around the house very easily in case there’s a particular scene or area that I want to shoot in. I’m looking forward to it all!
Overall, the price was about ~$350 for everything, and I think that it’s relatively fair for how much and what I bought. Only time will tell how the quality compares to other brands, but I’m feeling very optimistic about being able to shoot more frequently at home.
Anyway, that’s all for now, I hope this blog post was able to give some insight into what I’d like to be working on soon. In a future post, I will also be bringing up the topic of finding and photographing bands, but that will be at a later date once I get some experience!
That’s everything I’ve got for today so I hope you all have a great week and I’ll see you all in the next post!
- Zig